Jesseract

I resisted joining the so-called Twitterverse for a long time. It’s stupid, I said, who wants to follow anyone so closely? I don’t care that you’re staring existentially into your morning doughnut.

I also felt this way about Wikipedia. As a journalism major in college, at the beginning of each semester we were given the Wikipedia lecture. The Wikipedia lecture was, in many cases, treated more seriously than the plagiarism lecture, and we all actually had to sign a form saying we acknowledged the plagiarism lecture. Wikipedia is not a source. If you cite Wikipedia in an article, you will fail that assignment. In one class, we each created a user account, went in and made a spurious edit to a Wikipedia article and then counted the days until the error was corrected. Most of the people forgot about their edits until halfway through the semester, when they received an email saying their accounts had been suspended.I would go on wild rants to my friends about how much I hated Wikipedia. While I still don’t think that Wikipedia is a legitimate source for most of what I call news, it’s my go-to website if I want to find out if Rudy von Hacklheber was a real guy or just a figment of Neal Stephenson’s imagination.

Anyway, I managed to avoid Twitter until Neil Gaiman joined and started tweeting things that didn’t make it to his blog. Neil Gaiman is apparently the twitter gateway drug. Now I find myself tweeting all the time, to the point that a friend has given me his login so I can tweet random song lyrics. All the Jump, Little Children and Wicked soundtrack you could ever want!

Like most social media, Twitter tends to be what you make of it. If you, like me, only have 24 followers (and only know half of those personally), it’s not really very social. I find Twitter to be very one way: I send links I find amusing out into the ether and, most of the time, nothing more happens with them. Occasionally, someone retweets a link I’ve sent, or I get some crazy following me because they completely misunderstood a link I tweeted. When that happens, I find myself inordinately excited. Look! Someone paid attention to me! I’m like a puppy. There are a whole lot of questions that come with the satisfaction of having been tweeted. Why is this something I value? Is the Twitterverse just an incestuous web of hands patting their own backs? Is this the proverbial sound of one hand clapping?

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I’ll likely keep tweeting until I get bored or until job ads stop asking for people who are proficient in the 140-character sound bite.

Obviously, I will alert my corner of the twitterverse that I have written a new post for my blog. Perhaps it’s not incestuous so much as it is recursive. Round and round and round we go…

No, it’s not the new hit zombie film in the 28 ____ Later franchise. I am ashamed to say that I have not updated this blog since I started grad school, even though it was ostensibly created in order to apply what I learned to the real world.

One of the main reasons I haven’t updated in so long isn’t necessarily that I had nothing to say (let’s be honest, when has that ever stopped me before?) but that after a while the self-imposed pressure of coming up with something brilliant enough to justify my long absence was intimidating. I have decided that was ridiculous, though, and this brief update will be my reintroduction into the so-called blogosphere.

Do I even still have any readers?

We have a gigantic TV on in the office pretty much all the time, and while that can be handy sometimes, more often than not it’s distracting and annoying.

Sometimes you see something that makes you wish you were paying closer attention to the tv, however, and that happened to me just a few minutes ago. CNN had a segment about staying healthy while you travel, and I looked over just in time to see “Take antibiotics with you!” Because I couldn’t believe that any news organization, no matter how fluffy, would actually propose taking antibiotics with you “just in case,” I found the segment on CNN.com. The whole article was only marginally better, saying:

1. If you’re worried about the food or water, bring an antibiotic with you

Dr. Phyllis Kozarsky, an expert consultant in the division of global migration and quarantine at the Centers for Disease Control, recommends either azithromycin or a drug in the quinolone family, such as ciprofloxacin. You can get these only with a doctor’s prescription.

Because Cipro is harmless! From a LegalView press release:

Cipro, on the other hand, is an antibiotic that treats bacterial infections, similar to Ketek, but it has been linked to a very serious link of Achilles tendon rupture and tendonitis among patients. Cipro, which belongs to the fluoroquinolone drug family, recently had its labeling increased to a black-box warning along with the rest of the fluoroquinolone drugs. The black box labeling is the strongest label given by the FDA for a prescription drug and it often warns physicians about the serious Cipro risks associated with consuming the prescription antibiotic.

Cipro was, of course, the antibiotic pushed by the FDA after the anthrax attacks in 2001. Bayer held the patent until 2003, and there were serious issues with both the supply line and the cost of the drug. Even beyond the drug they’re choosing to recommend, is the fact that Americans are so inundated with antibiotics and antibacterials that we’re seeing a rise in diseases that aren’t affected by the drugs we have.

CNN offers a form for complaints related to its programming. I sent them a message, saying

During a show on safe traveling, your “expert” mentioned that you should take antibiotics with you, “just in case.” This is incredibly irresponsible, not only because there are different antibiotics for different health issues, but also because taking antibiotics you don’t need contributes to antibiotic-resistant killers like MDR Tuberculosis.

I know 24 hours is a long time to fill, CNN, but if you really want to be the “most trusted name in news” you have to give me legitimate information.

So, I’m an intern. This might make me thoroughly unqualified for giving any kind of resume advice, but I’ve never been one to ignore an opportunity to expound on subjects about which I know nothing.

The organization for which I’m interning this summer, The Center for Independent Media, is a progressive media group. We have a number of sites in different states, including the Washington Independent. I’ve been organizing resumes and cover letters for a Capitol Hill reporter position that they’re hoping to fill within the month. There are a couple of points I’d like to make about applying for a job.

1) Seriously, folks, look your resume over for spelling and grammar issues. This is at the top of every single “Resume tips and hints” article I’ve ever read, and I still have cover letters that said “I’ve have professional work experience on Capitol Hill…,” another that read “Your one woman reporter, videographer, online web editor,” and a third that had the word referrals on her resume twice, spelled two different ways, neither of which was correct. I talked about a couple of these with the person who is actually doing the hiring, and he said I may as well throw those away and not even bother giving them to him. We have one 3-month position open and at least 50 resumes. It’s not even a matter of standing out from the crowd, if you have these kind of blatant mistakes you’re not even going to make it into consideration.

2) Research your organization. CIM bills itself as “a nonpartisan nonprofit organization,” but if you check out the sites it sponsors, it becomes very obvious very quickly that they’re actually pretty liberal. If you want a job with a liberal organization, you’re probably not going to get very far starting your cover letter with, “[Name] was appointed by President George W. Bush to currently serve at NASA…” It may or may not be fair, it may or may not be discrimination, but there’s a fairly good chance that if you’re a Bush political appointee, you’re not going to enjoy working for a progressive media company.

3) This goes along with researching the organization, but deserves a number of its own. We are a web site that publishes blogs and longer stories. We do a little video, but it’s mainly the type of video that does not require editing and is uploaded to YouTube. If you send your resume with a link to your work, and that work is entirely in front of a camera, i.e. being an anchor, we’re going to assume you did no research and have no idea what the job entails and will deposit you in the circular file. All of CIM’s news sites are linked from the homepage. It’s not hard.

4) The executive assistant who had to print out all the cover letters, resumes and clips for the hiring people to go through has said that she much prefers PDFs. In her ideal world, she would receive an email with a general, “I’m applying for the Capitol Hill reporter position. Attached are resume, cover letter and clips.” in the body. The cover letter and resume would be together in one PDF, the clips would be together in another. Two total attachments. She also told me that, in her experience, people in D.C. much prefer PDFs to word documents as attachments. Your mileage may vary on that, but she’s the gatekeeper for every resume that comes into this office.

5) I have no idea of the frequency of this, but I’ve listened to the hiring manager make several reference calls this summer. If you are not completely confident that the person you have listed as a reference will provide a glowing description of you and your work, don’t list them. Seriously. If that person has any problem with you or your work or your personality, it will come out in this phone call. The hiring guy got off one phone call earlier this month just shaking his head and laughing. When I asked him what he was laughing at, he said he had a candidate that was absolutely perfect on paper. Right experience, right clips, everything was great. But when he called one of the candidate’s references, he got a completely different story, and as a result of that phone call the candidate was out of the running. I’m not saying that you should lie, or that you should list a reference that’s going to lie for you. But, just as I wouldn’t put my former boss down as a reference because of the mutual personal hatred I felt for him, you shouldn’t put someone down who you think might say something that will make a hiring director think second thoughts.

Again, I don’t actually have a job right now, so you can take this with all the grains of salt you want. Still, having talked to hiring managers, I’m certainly taking these tips to heart.

There’s a story in the Washington Post today declaring that John McCain has promised more of the same with respect to judicial nominations.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee said that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. “would serve as the model for my own nominees, if that responsibility falls to me,” highlighting the gap between Republicans and Democrats on the question of who should sit on the Supreme Court. Both justices have established strong conservative records since Bush appointed them, and the appointment of one more conservative to the nation’s highest court could tip the balance on issues such as abortion, discrimination, civil liberties and private property.

None of this is a surprise from the man who is becoming Bush lite. However, the article quotes ” a former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia who heads the Ethics and Public Policy Center” and gives a fascinating look into the effectiveness of framing.

Edward Whelan, a former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia who heads the Ethics and Public Policy Center, called the speech “very encouraging” and added: “McCain has drawn a clear line between his support for judicial restraint and Obama’s promise to appoint liberal judicial activists.”

Do you see what he did? There are two choices: liberal judicial activists and  justices who favor judicial restraint. No such thing as a “conservative judicial activist” who might make politically-inspired decisions about the issues. Even the wording is misleading-”support for judicial restraint.” What does that mean?
What that implies to me is that McCain is going to take all the powers Bush has appointed himself with and, as opposed to giving even a token nod to the balance of powers, will clothe himself in the robes of an imperial presidency.

I guess McCain is counting on the 28 percent of Americans who still manage to be willfully blind and/or stupid enough to support Bush.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad that wide attention is finally being paid to the conditions of animals in factory farms. The Washington Post has a story today revealing the findings of two new studies.

Factory farming takes a big, hidden toll on human health and the environment, is undermining rural America’s economic stability and fails to provide the humane treatment of livestock increasingly demanded by American consumers, concludes an independent, 2 1/2 -year analysis that calls for major changes in the way corporate agriculture produces meat, milk and eggs.

The only problem with these “new” findings? I read about them way back in 2001, in Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and more recently in Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Doesn’t it seem like the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Pew Charitable Trust (PDF link) could have saved 2 1/2 years of effort and money by simply endorsing one or both of these books? At the very least, I would think they owe the two authors some sort of acknowledgement for the work they’ve done in raising awareness with the general public.

In other news, the World Bank has said that “the grain required to fill a 25-gallon sport-utility vehicle tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year.” Yet Bush still insists on ethanol subsidies, in the face of world food shortages.

“In terms of the international situation, we are deeply concerned about food prices here at home, and we’re deeply concerned about people who don’t have food abroad,” Bush told a news conference.

He said the rise in food prices has been caused by weather, increased demand and energy prices, while only a small part is due to the production of corn-based ethanol.

“And the truth of the matter is, it’s in our national interest that we — our farmers — grow energy, as opposed to us purchasing energy from parts of the world that are unstable or may not like us.”

I don’t understand this moral outrage people feel about the rising cost of gas. The Declaration of Independence does not say we have the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and cheap gas. That’s not the way it works. That’s not the way capitalism works.

I’ll admit that I might be biased. I sold my car when I moved to Chicago, and now that I’m in D.C. I frequently look around at gridlock and giggle to myself. Yeah, my commute to work is an hour and a half each way, but I’ve read 32 books this year and usually arrive to work calm and not ranting about the idiots on 270.

I’m not going to argue about whether or not OPEC is a cartel, or debate the role the war in Iraq is playing in gas prices in the U.S., but I think there comes a time when you have to take some responsibility. If you live in a city like Chicago, New York, D.C., or San Francisco and you don’t take public transportation at least one day a week, you have no right to complain. You’re the reason why more cities don’t have public transit systems.

It’s interesting to me how the people who favor Clinton manage to turn a discussion around and find a way to make Obama look like the one who can’t “seal the deal.” This has been aggravating me for a while, but my simmering disgruntlement came to a boil after the Pennsylvania primary.

I’ve been planning a post about those questions, but before I could get to it,  Poliscope made a brilliant post this weekend that not only asked many of the questions that have been bugging me, but came up with more besides.

So, as I mentioned a few days ago, the establishment press has offered the following questions and/or observations on the outcome of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary. . . . and the self-delusion is just astonishing.

1. What is Barack Obama’s problem with the “white working-class?” Why can’t he close the deal?

I would phrase the questions somewhat differently

1a. Why won’t “white working-class” voters support a black candidate whose views on the economy are more or less interchangeable with Hillary Clinton? What accounts for this 48 point gap in this demographic’s support for Clinton? If Hillary Clinton were running against, say, a white candidate with Obama’s views, would the gap be 48 percent?

1b. Why couldn’t Hillary close the deal back in February?

Don’t forget . . . this is a candidate who enjoyed an overwhelming financial advantage over all her competitors before the primary season started. Hillary also had the advantage in endorsements, campaign machinery and name-recognition. Once voters went to the polls, they voted for Obama over Clinton by consistently healthy amounts. Obama is the underdog in this race, not Hillary. But you wouldn’t know it from the coverage.

1c. Why won’t African-American voters support Hillary Clinton? Why won’t people most like Hillary Clinton — white, affluent and well-educated professionals — vote for her?

Go take a look at the county-by-county returns for all these “critical” states in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. You’ll find that Obama is winning in blue counties and Hillary is finding votes in red counties. In other words, the Democratic base is voting for Obama in disproportionately high numbers and conservative, sometimes Republican, voters are voting for Hillary. Why?

His response to 1B is particularly enlightening. I read two national newspapers, several D.C.-based political sites and who knows how many blogs, and I had to actually think about that. Obama is the underdog? No, no, that’s not right! But Ivers has a point. What happened to the people who clamored about the “inevitability of Hillary“? Now the Huffington Post is saying DNC officials are considering offering Clinton a “consolation prize” of governorship of New York. That’s a pretty spectacular reversal.

Another excellent point is that conservatives are voting for Hillary. We’ve all heard that Rush Limbaugh has said he’ll campaign for Hillary should she win the nomination-because she’ll bring together the Republican party. For god’s sake, Ann Coulter said she’d campaign for Hillary should McCain win the nomination, and McCain has practically turned into Bush Jr. on the campaign trail.

There comes a point when you have to look beyond your own petty politics and examine the motives behind other people’s petty politics. Why do Limbaugh (who recently said he was “dreaming of riots” in Denver at the Democratic National Convention) and Coulter (who has said so many batshit things I couldn’t possibly choose just one) supporting Hillary? The running narrative is that they think she’s so divisive that whoever runs against her on the Republican ticket can’t help but win, but it might be worthwhile to attempt to look at her from their perspective. Maybe they see someone who flip-flopped on the war, who has a reputation (whether deserved or not) for being ruthless – who might, in other words, play just as dirty as they’ve been playing for the last eight years.

I don’t write much about personal finance, mostly because I still don’t really feel that I have any idea what I’m talking about. It is a topic I’m very interested in, however, as you can tell by the sheer number of PF blogs on my blogroll.

Money, possibly because I’ve never had much, fascinates me. How much people have, how they spend it, why they save it, how people live — I really enjoy talking about it. Among my friends, the only real taboo that comes up in conversations like these is the sometimes vast difference between what people make. As a journalist, for instance, I’m never going to make as much as a computer programmer. I sometimes have a real problem with envy, but for the most part I enjoy talking with my friends about this kind of stuff.

How does this match up with the old prohibition against talking about money, politics and religion? Well, according to the New York Times, not much for my generation.

Still, young workers seem somewhat less likely to adhere to this convention than older ones. The study found that 90 percent of those over 35 who were surveyed agreed with the statement “you should never let your co-workers know how much you make,” while 84 percent of subjects under 35 agreed.

But between friends almost anything is fair game. Beth Kobliner, the author of the best-selling “Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties,” said she had noticed that many young people now “have no idea what their boomer parents earn, but know every intimate detail about their close friends’ salaries, 401(k)s and debt loads.”

I do know what my best friend  and my boyfriend make, and I think I have a general idea of the range into which most of my friends fall. The Times looked at the popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and saw a pattern that, for once, I don’t disagree with.

“This is a generation that is much more attuned to teamwork, collaboration and sharing information,” he said. “Everything they do is a kind of group event. How do you know, when you get your first job offer, if $45,000 is a good offer, a bad offer or an O.K. offer? You go to your friends.”

I went to my boyfriend and the journalist community on Livejournal when I got the offer from my current job. They helped me look at the whole package, not just the first number.

I’m optimistic that conversations like this are a breakthrough, that people sharing this kind of information will help people make better decisions. I don’t think I’ll ever reach the level of Obsessive Consumption, in which the author posts drawings of everything she’s bought for the month, but I’ve thought about doing something similar. What’s holding me back? The fear that showing my friends what I actually spend my money on will make them like me less, which I realize is completely irrational.

I think the thing that most concerns me about the election thus far is the 28 percent of Clinton backers who say they’d vote for McCain if Obama gets the nomination. (Not to be outdone, 19 percent of Obama backers say they would vote for McCain if Clinton won the nomination.) After eight years of complaining about Bush, we have two candidates who essentially hold the same positions on most of the big issues (abortion, climate change, the economy, health care, immigration and Iraq) versus one who could generally called Bush light, and we’re completely ignoring the big picture in favor of petty favoritism. Yeah. I like one candidate significantly more than the other, but I’m more concerned that the right-wing religious crazies leave the Capitol than whether or not my guy gets in.

This is the Dems race to lose, people, and yet it looks like the Democratic party might once again shoot itself in the foot. I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, but can this country survive another four years of Bush’s policies?